Market One Blog

Using Automated Lead Nurturing For Lead Generation

A long time ago, an old mentor told me not to worry about what I accomplished today, but rather, what did I do today that will bear fruit tomorrow. Most of us sales and marketing types wring our hands every day at the thoughts of underperformance, not making the sale, an empty pipeline, a broken sales process and on and on and on. And for those overachievers, we tend to set the bar so high that it drives the stress levels off the charts. We self-create these high expectations that if not achieved, we feel like failures. Here’s the good news, if you do you’re not alone. A recent Statisa USA study pointed to the fact that 65% of sales executives develop burn-out symptoms including lack of motivation, high levels of depression and extreme fatigue during numerous points in their career. The survey also identified that sales executives derive most of their stress from the on-going pressure to move suspects through the sales process into opportunities. This should be a wake-up call for the GM’s of the world who sweat over the P&L day in and day out. Their soldiers are losing the fight.

Now having been a front line B2B sales guy for many years, this is not new news to me and is the reason why I wanted to pen this blog to give insight into the strategies that can help you automate your lead generation process.

How To Take The Stress Out Of Selling With Automated Lead Nurturing

More than ever, today’s B2B marketing and sales professionals are seeking the most effective and efficient ways to leverage the process of customer creation. They have executed the old guard strategies like branding, direct mail, print media and PR only to find little to no measurable results. Sound familiar? It sure does to me.

Flash the camera forward to the early 21st century. Today’s advanced suite of marketing technologies now makes automating the prospect touch process easier and more efficient.

With improvements in CMS and CRM systems, high-tech automation and inbound marketing software like HubSpot and Marketo, the process of customer creation has become smarter and more nimble. One important way to make the most of every opportunity is through the adoption of lead nurturing best practices. In its basic form, automated lead nurturing is a fairly simple process of creating and distributing relevant content to self-identified prospects, with the objective of securing continuous interaction and brand retention across numerous communication channels. Lead nurturing focuses on educating qualified sales leads who are not yet ready to buy. The key to successful lead nurturing is to deliver content that’s valuable enough to keep your audience engaged. If you do it right, lead nurturing can help you build a strong brand and solution preference in your prospects long before they’re actively engaged in a buying process. Lead nurturing software allows you to track qualified sales leads and automate content delivery through various marketing channels including automated email work flows, email news feeds, and blog and social posts

As you launch a lead nurturing program, your three main goals should be to:

Maintain permission to stay in contact with the prospect.This is by far the most important goal of lead nurturing, because without it, you can’t achieve the other goals. If a prospect loses interest in your messages, they’ll disengage by unsubscribing, marking your messages as spam, or emotionally unsubscribing.

Establish key ideas, thoughts, or comparison points through education. A potential buyer who you’re nurturing may not enter a buying process for a long time. But during the lead nurturing phase, if you can educate prospects and guide their thinking to incorporate specific requirements and ways of thinking about the market, your company and solutions will be much better positioned in their minds when they do become buyers.

Watch for signs of progress through the buying cycle.While you nurture potential buyers, you can watch their Digital Body Language to help you understand where they are in their buying process. As they progress through the process, they’ll reach a point at which time yourlead scoring system tells you they're ready to engage with sales.

Lead nurturing is a powerful way to stay automatically engaged with future buyers. When you execute the process successfully, you can establish buyer preference for your solutions while at the same time gaining an understanding of buyer timing. But this will only be possible if your lead nurturing programs deliver content that’s of sufficient value and interest to prospects so they stay in touch and keep you top of mind.

Conclusion

In its basic form, automated lead nurturing is a fairly simple process of creating and distributing relevant content to self-identified prospects, with the objective of securing continuous interaction and brand retention across numerous communication channels. Lead nurturing focuses on educating qualified sales leads who are not yet ready to buy. The key to successful lead nurturing is to deliver content that’s valuable enough to keep your audience engaged. If you do it right, lead nurturing can help you build a strong brand and solution preference in your prospects long before they’re actively engaged in a buying process.

For more information, contact us directly at info@mktone.com or download our white paper “Marketing Automation…Not All Leads are Created Equal”.